Bush's Pollution Charter

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Bush's pollution charter

 

Republican supporting energy firms set to escape controls on emissions

 

Julian Borger in Washington

Saturday August 23, 2003

The Guardian

 

The Bush administration plans to open a huge loophole in America's air

pollution laws, allowing an estimated 17,000 outdated power stations

and factories to increase their carbon emissions with impunity.

Critics of draft regulations due to be unveiled by the US

environmental protection agency next week say they amount to a death

knell for the Clean Air Act, the centrepiece of US regulation.

 

The rules could represent the biggest defeat for American

environmentalists since the Bush administration abandoned the Kyoto

Treaty on global warming two years ago. But the energy industry

welcomed them, saying they were essential for maintaining coal-fired

power stations.

 

The regulations are being challenged by 13 states including New

York. If adopted, they would represent a multi-million dollar victory

for energy corporations, most of whom are significant Republican

contributors, and who were consulted in the drafting of the

administration's energy plan by vice-president Dick Cheney in 2001.

 

The US accounts for a quarter of the world's carbon emissions, 10%

more than all of western Europe combined. Environmentalists fear that,

by relaxing its controls even further, America could undermine

attempts to persuade other countries to stick to the targets laid out

by Kyoto.

 

Under the current rules set in 1977, industrial sites built before the

Clean Air Act are exempt from its controls until they are upgraded in

any way, beyond "routine maintenance", that increases emissions. At

that point companies have to install filters and other controls or

face penalties.

 

Under the draft rules, seen by the Guardian, corporations can do far

more than "routine maintenance" - investing in old plant up to 20% of

its total value at a time - without having to spend money on

anti-pollution equipment. The figure of 20% is highly controversial,

and in some places in the document has been replaced by an

"X". Elsewhere the figure has been left, apparently as an oversight.

 

The rules do not impose a time limit for the investment, allowing a

firm to make successive upgrades to an old power station, oil refinery

or factory - replacing it piece by piece, and spending hundreds of

millions of dollars - as long as each upgrade costs less than a fifth

of the plant's total value.

 

"The companies could completely rebuild their plants by gaming a

gimmick that is designed to be gamed," said John Walke, of the Natural

Resources Defence Council, a pressure group which leaked the

draft."This is a massive giveaway," Mr Walke said. "The Bush

administration, using an arbitrary, Enron-like accounting gimmick, is

authorising massive pollution increases to benefit Bush campaign

contributors at the expense of public health."

 

An agency spokesman said yesterday that the draft was being worked on

and he could not comment on its contents.

 

Frank Maisano, spokesman for an industry group, the Electric

Reliability Coordinating Council, said he was not familiar with the

new rules. However, he said: "If it were to be set at 20%, that would

be reasonable for a routine maintenance provision. The reality is you

need to maintain your plants efficiently and reliably. The only thing

the environmentalists here are interested in is getting rid of the

coal plants," Mr Maisano said.

 

The change comes in the wake of victories for US justice department

lawyers in cases against six big polluters in the electric power

industry, forcing them to reduce emissions by more than half a million

tons a year. However, analysts said that, under the new rules, the six

would have won. The trade group representing the companies, Edison

Electric Institute, contributed nearly $600,000 to the Republican

party from 1999 to 2002, and had at least 14 contacts with the Cheney

energy task force in 2001.

 

Eliot Spitzer, attorney general of New York, one state challenging the

policy as being damaging to the health of residents, said he would

mount a legal challenge as soon as the regulations were signed.

 

 

http://groong.usc.edu/world/us/msg01912.html

 

 

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